William Freudenburg

William Freudenburg, Dehlsen professor of environment and society at UC Santa Barbara, will examine the factors — political and otherwise — that contributed to the April 2010 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in a webcast next Monday (Nov. 15).

Freudenburg's talk, "Learning Lessons from Disaster — The BP Oil Spill and the Future of Energy in America," will be broadcast live from UC Santa Barbara at 5 p.m. Monday. Information on how to access the webcast will be posted at http://es.ucsb.edu/freudenburg.

An environmental and economic catastrophe, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill proved to be the largest offshore oil spill in history. Freudenburg will provide a better understanding of the disaster and offer insights into the kinds of energy choices that might make better sense for the world today.

The Office of Research and Graduate Studies (ORGS) is coordinating with UC Santa Barbara to present this live webcast. After the session, an archived video of the lecture will be available online.

Freudenburg is co-author of the recently published book, "Blowout in the Gulf — The BP Oil Spill Disaster and the Future of Energy in America."

"We've been getting into increasingly deep water for years, not just literally, but also in terms of our energy policies," Freudenburg said. "One of the reasons is that until 1959, the United States was a virtual one-nation OPEC. Unfortunately, that was when we set up a lot of new policies that made no sense for a nation with dwindling oil reserves."